Dragon's Egg (11 page)

“A
n army?” Mella demanded. “Looking for
you
?”

They were by themselves in front of the queen, beside the great dark lake. “I would speak to these humans alone,” the huge dragon had said, and the others had promptly and obediently moved away, Chiath with an angry snarl and Alyas with several backward glances.

“It's not really an army,” Roger said awkwardly. “I mean, it can't be. There wouldn't have been time to muster the whole army. One company at most. I supposed they followed us. Damien must have sent a message to my…” To Mella's astonishment, Roger turned bright red. He finished his
sentence with a mumbled word too low for her to hear.

Dragons, however, had very keen ears. “Your
father
?” the queen growled.

“Your—” Mella had to try twice to get the word out. “Your father? Has an
army
?”

But of course he did. Roger had told her so himself not three minutes ago. “Roger Astorson,” he'd said. The youngest son of King Astor.

Mella was outraged. “You never
said
!”

Roger looked ready to melt with embarrassment. “I didn't think he'd
come,
” he mumbled. “He's busy. There's so much to do.”

“You didn't think he'd come when his
son
disappeared?”

Roger shrugged miserably. Mella shook her head. “So that's why Alain…”

“He must have spent some time in the capital,” Roger said glumly. “He probably saw me there.”

“You could have said!”

“I didn't want…”

“And what's he
doing
?”

The queen had been listening attentively. But now she spoke, and her crest bristled ominously. “What he is doing,” she said, low and fierce, “is fairly obvious. He is going to war.”

“Against the dragons,” Mella said, understanding at last. “Because he thinks they…took his son? The prince,” Mella added pointedly. “You.”

The queen and Roger both nodded. They had grasped what was happening, Mella realized, much more quickly than she had.

Roger lifted his head to look the dragon queen in the eye. “You must let us go down,” he said quickly. “It's the only thing to do.”

“Must I?” The deep black eye of the dragon opened a little wider, and her voice was soft. Mella nearly shivered, and without meaning to she clutched the dragon chick a little closer. That soft voice and that thoughtful eye were much more frightening than Chiath's roar.

“You are no prince here,” the queen said quietly to Roger. “Do not presume.”

“I do not.”

This was Roger? Mella blinked in surprise at his sharp tone. She'd heard him sound like this only once before, when he'd confronted Alain. When had he learned to sound this sure of himself?

“I do not presume,” Roger said, more softly this time. “They are looking for me. If they see I'm safe, they won't attack. It's best for all of us if we both go down.”

The queen closed her eyes briefly and then opened them again. Slowly she shook her great golden head from side to side. “You know the way to the Hatching Ground,” she said, her deep voice rumbling in Mella's bones. “That is something the human army must not know.”

“We wouldn't
tell
!” Mella said indignantly.

“We cannot take that risk,” answered the queen. “We will not harm you. But we cannot let you leave.”

“We—we saved the Egg for you!” Mella felt as if her anger were fizzing and spurting inside of her. “We brought it all the way here, and—”
And it wasn't easy!
she wanted to shout. There'd been
miles of walking, a river, a kidnapper, the darkness inside a mountain. But they'd done it. They'd made it. And this was the gratitude they got? “You said you were in our debt!” Mella shouted in outrage, and the dragon chick chattered like a frightened squirrel and fanned her delicate golden wings.

“Mella!” Roger snapped, and Mella realized belatedly that yelling at a queen might not be the wisest course when they stood in a valley surrounded by dragons. But the queen did not seem angry.

“And so we are,” she said, and dipped her head to Mella. “In debt to both of you. And if it were my danger and my choice only, I would carry you down myself. You have earned as much. But a queen has more to think of than her honor. I cannot risk the safety of us all.”

“But sending us down will only serve the safety of your people—dragons—subjects,” Roger argued, much more politely than Mella. “The army will have scouts in the forest. They might find the way
up at any moment, and even if they don't—” He swept a hand at the stony valley. “You cannot stay here forever. If you manage to fly off under cover of night, they'll follow you. Now that they know you exist, they'll hunt you. You won't be able to hide anymore.”

“We do not
hide
from humans,” the queen growled.

“Forgive me for the word, then. But my father's army will find you.”

“And if they do, do you think we cannot fight them?”

“Of course you can,” Roger agreed readily. “But he can afford to lose much more than you can. The wolf is stronger, but the dogs still bring it down. You don't need a war. You need a treaty. And we can make one for you.”

The dragon chick squirmed in Mella's arms, and she let the little creature down gently to the pebbly ground. The queen and Roger—the queen and the prince—seemed to have forgotten she was there.

“I will not say to you that humans have no honor,”
the queen said, giving Roger a long, steady glance. “But we have been betrayed in the past. And your blood is—”

“Is
what
?”

“It is not easy for any dragon to trust one of Coel's house. You came up by the old passageway. Did what you saw there tell you no tales?”

“What we saw there?” Roger's brow furrowed. “We saw—we didn't understand what we saw. Dragons and…bones…we don't know…”

“Humans have short lives and short memories. You do not know what you ask, when you ask me for my trust.”

“Then keep me.”

Mella was surprised to hear the words coming out of her own mouth.

“What?” Roger stared at her. The queen did as well.

Mella cleared her throat. “You can keep me. As a hostage. If Roger—if the army doesn't leave—then you can…” Maybe it would be best, she thought, not to finish that sentence.

Roger looked alarmed. “That's—Mella, I don't think that's—”

The queen laughed. The ground trembled under Mella's feet.

“Now we must both trust. Is that it? No one told me humans were such clever bargainers. Well done. One may stay and one may go. And you, prince, have told us time is short. You will go now.”

 

It would take too long, the queen had said, for Roger to return by the staircase, and she chose a young dragon with bronze-colored scales to carry him down instead.

“And Lynet will take you,” the queen had told Mella.

Take her? Mella had thought she was staying. She'd thought that was the whole point. “Take me where?”

“Somewhere safe,” was all the queen had answered.

Lynet turned out to be a gray dragon with the small crest of a female. With Mella on her back
and Roger on the bronze, they stood at the very edge of the valley. Mella, peering down, saw a sheer wall plummeting to a valley hundreds of feet below, where a frothy white river churned and leaped through its bed. She turned her head to look at Roger. There had hardly been time to speak before the queen had ordered them on dragonback. She should have said good-bye, or good luck, or something. Roger's mouth was moving, but the wind whipping past her ears snatched the sound away.

Then Lynet fell forward.

She did not leap, she simply toppled like a stone. It happened so quickly that Mella felt her body rise off the dragon's back, and she threw herself forward to clamp both arms around the smooth gray neck. She thought she might have screamed, but they were falling too swiftly for her own voice to reach her ears.

Lynet did not even flap her wings. She simply held them out to each side, fully extended, as they fell.

And then they hit the updraft the dragon had been expecting. Mella was crushed down by the pressure as they suddenly soared upward.

The bronze dragon swooped down, hidden from the sight of the army by a long outcropping of stone. But Lynet didn't follow. She swerved to the left and landed deftly on a wide stony ledge that jutted out from the mountain, beating her wings for balance and scattering pebbles widely.

The dragon twisted her head on her long, flexible neck so that she could look coldly at Mella, still seated on her back. “The queen has said you are to wait here,” she said shortly.

Here? This was somewhere safe? Mella climbed down very carefully, keeping the dragon's body between herself and the sheer drop. The ledge was wide enough that there was no real danger of falling as long as she watched where she put her feet. All the same, she felt better after she'd sat down with her back firmly against the mountainside.

“How long?” she asked.

But Lynet didn't seem inclined to waste words on her human passenger. She spread her wings and leaped off the ledge—Mella pressed herself harder against the rocky wall behind her and covered her face with her hands as the dragon's wing beats stirred up a small whirlwind—and then swooped back up to the valley, leaving Mella alone.

From the ledge, Mella could see the river they had toiled up so painfully, a silver chain curling across the gray and green land. She could even see the waterfall that had marked the entrance to the mysterious room and the stairway up the mountain. On the plain beside the pool where she had fallen in, she could see something else—rows and rows of dull white squares stretched across the grass. Tents, Mella realized. Bright streamers snapped in the wind. The largest tent, in the middle, was not white, but striped red and yellow.

So that was what an army looked like.

Mella watched tiny scurrying shapes, small and urgent as ants, hurrying among the patches of white. She watched clouds scroll and drift across
the bright blue sky. An eagle flew past, so far below that she could look down on its strong brown wings. She supposed that never before had a prisoner had such a breathtaking view.

But the ledge was still a prison. No way up or down, nothing she dared to climb, nothing to do but wait.

S
itting on her ledge, Mella counted two more eagles and four hawks before something bigger than either came flying toward her, wings glimmering white in the sunlight. Alyas landed awkwardly on the ledge, scattering pebbles, flapping his wings wildly for balance. He was having trouble, Mella realized, because he was holding something in one clawed forefoot, something heavy and limp that dripped red onto the ground.

Mella stifled the screech that rose up in her throat. Whatever he was holding was definitely…dead.

“Venison. I thought you must be hungry,” Alyas explained politely, holding the haunch of meat out
to her. “Some of us had been hunting before you arrived. I like cooked meat, myself. But do you prefer it raw?”

“Cooked is fine, thank you,” Mella said, her voice just the slightest bit quivery and wavering with relief.

Alyas turned his head aside, cleared his throat—a rumbling sound that started deep in his chest and traveled slowly up his long neck—opened his mouth, and directed a stream of flame at the raw meat, turning it carefully on one claw as it roasted. The rich smell made Mella's stomach growl and for a moment it took her back to the Inn, with meat turning on the spit before the fire, ready to feed the hungry guests who would be arriving soon. She had to blink hard to keep from crying. How had she gotten from her home to this windswept ledge on a mountainside, sharing a meal with a dragon? And would she ever get back?

Since Mella had no knife—it had been taken from her at Gwyn's village—Alyas used his claws
to cut slices of the meat for her. It was roasted to a turn—crisp on the outside, pink inside, and dripping juices over Mella's burnt fingers. Hunger won out over homesickness and worry, and Mella ate with single-minded devotion until her stomach was satisfied at last. She sighed and wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

Alyas had settled down on his haunches and tucked his tail around himself, neat as a cat. He offered Mella something else, something she had not noticed before—a small skin of fresh water. “The queen has said you must be cared for,” he remarked as she drank thirstily. “She said that we must treat you as a friend until the worst is proved.”

Mella lowered the water skin. “Nothing's going to be proved,” she said angrily. “Roger
said.
”

Roger had, after all, defeated Alain. He'd rescued the Egg when she'd dropped it. If he said he could turn an army around, she would believe him.

Alyas's crest rippled up and down nervously.
“I hope so. For both our sakes. No one will let me forget that I befriended humans.”

Mella frowned. “Well, the people I know are not likely to be very happy that I saved a dragon's egg,” she pointed out.
But I'm not keeping
you
trapped on a ledge because of it
, she didn't add. She felt that her pointed silence was eloquent enough.

Alyas sighed. The wind of it blew Mella's hair into her eyes. She felt her face settling down into a sulky expression.

Far below, another eagle screamed. The sound died away.

Mella brushed a flat stretch of the ledge clean of pebbles and dirt and then selected ten small stones, five dark, five light. With a sharp-edged rock she scratched a grid on the rock with two lines one way, two the other.

“Here,” she said, pushing the dark pebbles over toward Alyas. “You try to get three in a row. I'll go first.”

Mella won the first two games, Alyas the third. After that it became too easy. Mella made the grid
wider, and they played at four in a row, then five. Alyas bent close over the game board. He tended to puff small clouds of steam from his nostrils when he was thinking.

Mella leaned over to place her third stone. “Why did you, then?” she asked.

“I beg your pardon? Why did I…?”

“Befriend humans.” There must have been some reason, after all, why Alyas had approached them, why he'd taken them to see the Hatching, why he alone of all the dragons seemed willing to talk to them.

The tip of Alyas's tail twitched, brushing a few pebbles off the ledge. “Well, I…that is…” He picked up a pebble between two claws and put it neatly in place. “Perhaps you would not mind…”

“Mind what?” She'd win, Mella thought, if he left that there. He wasn't paying attention to the game.

“Would you care to…to tell me…”

“Tell you
what
?”

“Your story!” Alyas exclaimed, as if it should
have been obvious. “The rescue of the Egg! I am, you see, a song-maker.” His wings lifted off his back and flapped slightly, stirring a breeze that blew dust and grit into Mella's face. “If it is true…I mean, well.” His crest drooped, and he looked a bit ashamed of himself. “If the other, the boy, does as he promised, if you are truly not spies—”

“You think we're
spies
?” Mella demanded.

Alyas's sigh tumbled the pebbles from their places on the grid. “I do not
think
so. You are only children, after all. And what army would send children as spies? But humans…I've always been told how easily humans lie. Still, if you are what you say, if you have saved the Egg through hardship and danger—what a song that would make! Will you tell me?”

“Why should I?” Mella snapped. “Why do you want to hear it? If humans are liars.” She didn't have to talk to him just to be insulted, she thought, and sat back against the rock wall, her arms folded.

Alyas looked at her humbly with his brown gold
eyes. “Pardon for offending you. I spoke carelessly. But…” His voice took on a coaxing tone. “Do you not wish it known, the truth of how you brought the Egg to us? You and the boy. Coel's son.” Coel's great-great-great-great grandson, more like, Mella thought, but didn't bother correcting him. “If Coel's house helped to save an Egg, that would do much to balance the debt between your kind and ours. His name and yours will be remembered by dragons for all time! And of course…” He tried to look modest and failed utterly. “Mine as well. As the bard who made the song.”

Just to be contrary, Mella made him wheedle a little more. But at length she told him the story. The Egg in the fire and her promise to Kieron. (She admitted that Kieron had been killed by a Defender but neglected to add that the Defender had been Roger's master; no need to give
every
detail.) Alyas growled in appreciation as he heard how the little wild dragons had rescued them from Alain. Gwyn's village and Alain again, the waterfall
and the pool and the passageway up through miles of rock. Alyas listened attentively and asked eager questions as the sun slid past its highest point and began the long slide down the other side of the sky.

When she had finished, Alyas made a rumbling sound of appreciation. He seemed to be thinking deeply.

His turn to tell a story now, Mella decided. Why were the dragons so angry at humans? Why did they call Coel a traitor? Gwyn had said something about that as well, about a great betrayal. And did their reason have anything to do with the diamonds of Coel's house carved in the stone before the staircase that led to the Hatching Ground?

But as she drew in a breath to ask the question, a sound interrupted her. It came from high overhead, drifting over the edge of the valley and down to the ledge where she and Alyas sat together.

It was not a roar, or a growl, or a hiss, or any of the sounds Mella was used to from dragons. It was
music. If there were words in it, she could not understand them. But the sound was sad and sweet and fierce all at once, and it made her think of the wind before a wild storm and the cold depths of the sky on a winter's night.

“What is it?” she whispered to Alyas.

“It is a lament,” the white dragon said softly, blinking his amber eyes. “For Kieron.”

Mella could not ask questions then, could not stir, could do nothing but listen, her mind drifting on a river of sound. The song went on and on. It contained, Alyas whispered, all the names of Kieron's ancestors since the first true dragons had hatched.

At last the sound lulled Mella into a sleepy trance. She hadn't slept much the night before, between worrying over the Egg and escaping from Gwyn's village and fleeing from Alain. Not to mention walking up a mountain. She curled up on the ground and her cheek came to rest on something scaly and soft and warm. Alyas tucked a wing
snugly over her. She heard a deep rumbling and felt it through her skin as he hummed quietly to himself, working on his song.

 

Something jerked Mella awake, a long, clear note that might have come from the mouth of a trumpet or the throat of a dragon. She sat up quickly, her head still muzzy with sleep.

“What?” she asked groggily. “What's happening?”

“Amazing,” Alyas breathed. He was stretching his long neck out into thin air, peering down at the foot of the mountain.

“
What's
amazing?” Mella, on her hands and knees, crawled out to look over the edge too.

“He has done it. The army is retreating.”

And indeed, Mella, squinting in the rising wind, could see that some of the white squares were disappearing even as she watched, being taken down, rolled up, and packed away into parcels too small to be seen from so far above. A line of horses and carts was forming, heading away from the waterfall and the pool.

The anxiety that Mella had been refusing to let herself feel melted away. “I
told
you,” she said, feeling a smile stretch wide across her face. “Now you can take me down.”

Alyas shook his head. “Now I must take you to the queen. She has said so, indeed.” He crouched down so she could climb on his back. “Hold tight.”

This time Mella was prepared for a plunge off the ledge, and hugged his neck tightly until his wings caught an updraft to send them soaring back up toward the Hatching Ground.

The queen was waiting for them once more by the lake. And around her, in a circle a respectful distance away, were rows and rows of dragons. Their wings overlapped, and their long necks stretched and strained as they peered overhead to catch a glimpse of Alyas, spiraling down with Mella on his back. She suspected him of adding some graceful turns and flourishes to his descent, purely for drama.

The white dragon landed neatly in front of the queen and dipped his neck in an elegant movement
that Mella decided must be the dragon equivalent of a bow. She slipped off his back. One of her feet hit the ground first and the second followed a few moments later, so she had to hop awkwardly to keep her balance. It was the very opposite of graceful, and Mella felt her face blush hot. What was she doing here, alone before a dragon queen? Roger was used to the company of royalty. He would have known what to do or say. Without him, Mella felt grubby and insignificant and extremely small.

However, Roger was
not
there, so she would have to do the best she could without him. Remembering how her friend had bowed, she made the dragon queen a curtsy.

And the queen, with the little dragon chick frisking around her feet, dipped her neck in response.

Had the queen just
bowed
to her, to an innkeeper's daughter? Mella made sure her mouth didn't drop open in astonishment. But she couldn't stop her eyes from widening.

“We are once more in your debt,” the dragon queen said.

And all the dragons, even Chiath, gave a muted roar of agreement and approval. They kept the sound low, Mella realized, to spare her ears. But she felt it making the air tremble, vibrating the ground beneath her feet. The breeze of it lifted and stirred her hair.

The queen held her front foot out to Mella. Dangling from a claw were two thin leather thongs. From each swung an ivory white tooth longer than Mella's finger.

“A gift for you and for your companion,” the queen said. “These will mark you as dragonfriends. They are yours to wear for life and to pass on to your children.”

Every dragon watched as Mella walked across the black sand and reached up to take the two pendants from the queen's claws. She had to blink and squint as the sunlight flashed bright on the queen's golden scales. The dragon towered over her, massive, like a mountain herself—the strong curve of her neck, crowned with her elegant crest, the long slope of her back, the graceful curl of her
tail. Mella longed to touch the warmth of those scales, to smooth the crest or rub behind the ears, as she would have done with one of her own herd. But she did not dare. Instead she took the two pendants carefully in her hand, slipping them both over her head for safekeeping.

“Thank you,” she said. That was all she could think of. And it seemed to be all that was needed.

The dragon chick had noticed Mella by now, and with chirps of delight pranced over to nibble on the girl's bootlaces and put her small clawed forefeet on Mella's knees. Mella bent down and picked her up, warm in her hands, impossibly light, her scales smooth as water. Fire and air and serpent, Mella thought. Dragon.

The chick nuzzled Mella beneath the chin and hummed with pleasure. Mella didn't want to put her down, even when she squirmed and flapped her wings restlessly. But she did, and the young dragon scampered back toward the queen, who tucked her safely under one wing.

“She is young,” the queen said tolerantly. “But
she will come to know how two human children saved her.”

Was there something like sympathy in those wide, dark eyes? Could the queen know how Mella felt, how much she missed the weight and the warmth of the Egg in her hands and the knowledge that she was its keeper?

It was hard to tell, looking up at that smooth, scaly face. All the queen said was “Alyas will take you home.”

Foolishness
, Mella told herself fiercely, blinking hard. She'd brought the Egg here safely. She kept her promise. And now her own herd, as well as her family, were waiting for her back at the Inn. She still had a keeper's job to do, the job Gran had given her.